Description
Every history of the American West has to decide what to do with its own pleasure. The gunfighters and gold strikes are why most readers turn up; the dispossession underneath them is why an honest historian cannot simply serve the fun. Peter Cozzens knows this, and he says so on his opening pages — Deadwood, he writes, keeps its “romance and allure only as long as we willfully ignore its foundational sins.” Having named the problem with that much force, he then writes a book that mostly enjoys itself.
Deadwood is the first full account of the town’s early years: the three-year stretch from the 1876 gold rush to the fire that leveled the place in 1879. Cozzens treats the town as a single life — his four parts trace its conception, birth, adolescence, and what he calls a flaming early death. Wild Bill Hickok is shot in the back of the head before the prologue ends. Calamity Jane drinks her way across two decades and several territories. George Hearst turns up late and quietly buys the country’s richest gold mine out from under everyone.
Cozzens is very good at the close texture of the thing. He has read the Black Hills Pioneer to saturation, and he knows how to open a chapter on a single person and widen the lens — Preacher Smith, the Methodist who came not for gold but to reclaim sinners, and was dead within months.
The demythologizing works, too. The Hickok of these pages is half-blind, short of money, too proud to live on his wife’s charity, a legend worn thin before the bullet finds him.
But hold the structure up to the light. The Lakota story — the theft of the Pahá Sápa, the war Grant’s circle provoked as pretext, the appropriations rider that offered the Lakota a choice between ceding the Black Hills and starvation — runs through the book in chapters of its own, alternating with the Deadwood chapters, never quite fusing with them. Cozzens calls it an “undercurrent,” and the word is honest about what he has done with it. An undercurrent runs beneath; it does not rearrange the surface. I kept waiting for a Deadwood chapter to be reorganized by the knowledge the whole town was a trespass — for the gold dust weighed out on the No. 10 Saloon’s bar to be set against that rider — and it mostly isn’t. The two stories stay courteous neighbors.
One claim I would argue with outright. Cozzens holds that Deadwood’s isolation bred “a spirit of cooperation and racial amity unique on the frontier” — that white, Black, and Chinese residents mixed with a decency the period rarely permitted. He has the anecdotes. A white teenager who bullied three Chinese men is arrested; Seth Bullock breaks up a gang shaking down Chinese newcomers; the law recovers a laundryman’s stolen shirts. These incidents are real and worth preserving. But a run of decent moments is not a structure, and “unique on the frontier” is the sort of claim a single town’s surviving newspapers can flatter and never settle. The harder trouble is that the amity thesis sits inches from the dispossession Cozzens has just laid out. A settlement that exists because a people were starved off sacred land is a strange place to locate a model of racial generosity. He does not reconcile the two. The demythologizer builds, here, a small myth of his own.
The town-as-creature conceit is appealing, and it quietly does work it should not. Treating the place as a thing with its own life and soul lets a pile of episodes read as a biography, and lets the 1879 fire serve as a death with a third act’s symmetry. Except the town did not die — Cozzens says as much himself, a few chapters on, noting that today’s Deadwood runs on casinos that still take Hickok as their patron saint. Anyone who has wandered a restored frontier main street, gift shop bolted to old saloon, already suspects the legend is the product. The sources lean the way the structure leans. The white town wrote its own record, fond and boosterish, in the Pioneer and in pioneer memoirs; the Lakota counterweight reaches Cozzens mostly through Black Elk, and through Neihardt’s mediation of Black Elk. A book can be only as even as its archive, and this archive was kept by the winners.
None of which makes the book dishonest — that is the odd part. Cozzens is forthright. He cites the newspaperman’s line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” and declares he will print the facts instead. He largely does. The facts are arranged so the enjoyable ones hold the foreground and the unbearable one stays low and constant. That may be the most honest thing the book discloses without intending to: how hard it is, even for a careful historian who has said the sin aloud, to stop it settling back beneath the floorboards.
The last pages leave the town behind. In 1931, Black Elk — in his sixties, his sight failing — climbs Harney Peak, the center of the old Lakota world, and asks the Grandfathers to let some root of the withered sacred tree live again. He had told his son that thunder and rain would mean they had heard. A thin drizzle fell. There was distant thunder, and no lightning. Cozzens ends the scene there, in the silence afterward, and it is the truest page he has written — quieter than any gunfight in the book, and the one place where he does not let you print the legend.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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